It’s far beyond time to drop the pretense.
There never was a Palestinian nation and there can never be a Palestinian state.
The Mideast cannot stabilize — much less move towards peace, prosperity, and human development — as long as the pernicious lie of “Palestine” persists.
The matter is hardly subtle.
The PLO Charter, written in 1964, states clearly that the people designated “Palestinians” are Arabs who see themselves as an integral part of the Arab nation. Their identity as something uniquely Palestinian is cultivated as a critical weapon deployed in opposition to Zionism.
Hamas — the specific villain in this week’s barbarism — is even clearer.
According to the Hamas Charter (1988), Palestine is an Islamic waqf, a mere administrative unit within the empire of Islam — a faith that recognizes no legitimate subdivision into nations.
From inception, the entire Palestinian self-definition, and its entire raison d’être, has been the negation of the Zionist dream for an independent Jewish state in the historic Jewish homeland.
To this day, Palestinianism combines the inner workings of a hate group with the outer trappings of a nationalist movement.
The statements of Palestinian leaders, the Palestinian press, the Palestinian educational systems, and Palestinian entertainment are replete with demonization of the Jews, incitement, calls for violence, even advocacy of genocide.
Palestinians raise their children to hate Jews and to glory in those who kill Jews — as the world is seeing in real-time video. Palestinian society, from top to bottom, allocates greater resources to ensuring that their people despise Jews than to encouraging their people to help themselves.
Palestinianism on the ground today remains far, far more concerned with destroying Israel than it does with building Palestine; hatred of the reviled other is far more important than love of self.
This duality is unique.
No other movement features such a complete misalignment of inner functioning with outwardly stated goals.
No other allegedly nationalist movement has focused so little on nation building and so much on fostering hatred.
Understanding this dual nature of Palestinianism is critical to appreciating why all attempts to extract reasonable and expected behavior from Palestinian leaders ultimately fail.
When it comes to representation in global organizations or diplomatic negotiations, the movement is fully equipped to function as expected.
At the end of the day, at the point of agreement, compromise, and implementation, it lacks any of the necessary tools.
What Hamas is now doing is far more honest than anything that the leaders of the Palestinian Authority have stated — in English, for Western consumption — in the 30 years since Oslo.
Indiscriminate barbarism unleashed in a fury against Jews and all who would stand with them has always been the dream.
No leader of this hate movement would ever dare abandon it.
The hatred/nationalist duality also explains why the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is so thin: the dominant force in the anti-Israel movement is a century-old, virulent, anti-Jewish hate group.
It’s nearly impossible to stand against Zionism without standing in favor of Palestinianism. And the core element of Palestinianism remains what it has always been — unreconstructed Jew hatred.
The permanent crisis in which both Israel and the “Palestine refugees” live is an intentional and necessary consequence of Palestinianism’s success of a plan fostered by imperialists, colonialists, Nazis, Communists, Islamists — and now Iran and large parts of the Western left.
Through these deeply antisemitic alliances, the Palestinian national movement has gained widespread acceptance of its foundational lie that the “Palestinians” constitute a distinct people, fundamentally different from neighboring Sunni Arabs, rather than simply a hate group directed against the Jews.
If the millions of people trapped in the Palestinian identity are ever to be given a chance for a decent life, if the region is ever to know stability, the world must first dispense with the foundational lie of a distinct Palestinian nation.
Palestine, like Andalusia or Rumelia, was an administrative region of relevance to those studying the history of Islamic (or Roman) Empires; it has never defined a state and has no place in the modern nation-state system.
In early 2020, shortly before news of Covid derailed the world, the Trump administration revealed the political portion of its Mideast plan.
It contained the first clear assessment of the situation and the first honest effort to give those consigned to the Palestinian identity decent opportunities while allowing the region to stabilize and develop.
It called upon the Arab and Islamic states to resettle and absorb their refugees — just as the tiny Jewish state did for the refugees the Islamic world created.
No one expects the Biden administration to resurrect a Trump plan.
Pity.
The welfare of millions of Jews and Arabs depend upon it.
